Swimming In The River Lethe
by PinkFreud
Summary: She is being haunted, and all she wants to do is forget. HouseCameron.
1. Chapter 1

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: Well, I certainly don't own any of it...I wish I did, but then again I wish Superman was real too, and we don't always get what we wish for, such is the way of the world.

A/N I hope you like this, whomever should read it. I'm a relatively new fan of the show; I recently bought season 1 on DVD and watched it so many times that my poor DVD player is on the verge of a nervous collapse. I really love the characters, because they seem complex and fun. Btw, this story will have a couple of chapters, this is only the first bit.

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_There isn't any mercy in bodies, after they cease to be people. Nothing lovely about dead eyes and cold skin, these shells, these vehicles that have failed us. Certain people, for whatever reason, have seen far too much death. And these certain people deal with what they saw, and what they felt as a result of what they saw, in different ways. Some prefer dark humor, because if you can make something funny, it seems to be smaller, less frightening, less real. Some people fold up, become small and damaged, with a constant look of fear and pain in their eyes. Some just have apathy, some have rage, and others have bewilderment._

_It takes a special kind of person to become a doctor; to have a life in your hands, and yet not really in your hands at all--but at any rate, you like to **believe** that your hands have powers over all life and fate. To be a doctor, you have to have an amount of compassion, yes, but not so much that it leads to attachment, to seeing every dying person as someone beloved. Because then, it would be like losing a best friend every day of your life, and how on earth could anyone cope with that and not go mad? No, there has to be a certain degree of distance, a line that you don't cross. You stand behind it, if only so that you can sleep at night knowing that you did try your very best, even if it all went wrong and monitors ran a flat and endless line that screamed along greenly in a sad and screeching hum._

_You have to be able to go home, and make dinner, and kiss your husband or wife and your kids if you have them, and then fall asleep without seeing dead eyes and hearing phantom monitors waking you in the night. _

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Death crept everywhere in the hospital, and Dr. Alison Cameron figured she could smell it, or at least detect it by some sixth sense she had developed against her will. Death crawled on the white walls and hummed in the light fixtures; it made the whole place heavy.

It was some time in October, and leaves were pulling loose from branches, falling all around like confetti. The wind blew a little colder, and there was no doubt that winter was once again settling itself around New Jersey. Winter was one of those inevitable things on the east coast, like death. Except that death was everywhere. You couldn't avoid it by hanging out in Florida, although a great many tried. Alison figured that was why there were so very many old people in Florida. If you could cheat winter, maybe you could cheat death. But that was really stupid logic. December was December no matter where you went, even if it didn't feel cold. And so you died, even if you died peaceful and warm in your sleep and couldn't feel yourself dying.

Alison was thinking all these things to herself as she finally left the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, as she walked out onto the street in the growing darkness. The night smelled like autumn, of chill air and smoke from where summer was being sacrificed on a pyre. She stepped on some dry leaves and they crunched under her feet. She suddenly recalled being nine years old and having little memorial services for ants that her brother had drowned in puddles. She was always like that; caring too much and feeling too responsible for everything that suffered in the world. She even felt sorry for stepping on these leaves, because they seemed so sad already.

She was getting scared. She needed to admit that. Scared of what she saw day after day, of everything she had ever seen. It was wearing on her, and she couldn't sleep anymore. She wondered why on earth it took this long to have an effect; and she figured it needed time. Nobody goes crazy overnight.

She didn't like being alone, because she felt unprotected. She was a big girl, and there were no such things as ghosts, or at least her rational mind said so, but she was still wary, and the shadows still played tricks on her. And sometimes she could no longer fight back the images of death that she had seen.

It's been almost proven that the more you try not to think about something, the more you inevitably will think about it. Alison once read about a boy whose brother told him to stand on the street corner and not think about a white bear. That was it. Think about anything and everything except a white bear. Of course, the boy couldn't do it, because he'd had the image of a white bear put in his brain, and the more he tried to fight it off, the more prominent it became in his psyche.

She supposed it was the same with herself and dead things. By dead things she meant dead bodies that once lived and breathed and ate, dead eyes that once held life and looked upon the world, dead hands that would never hold a child or a fork or a newspaper ever again. She was sad for them, and confused, and she grieved, and at last understood why he stayed so removed. She wanted to forget. Forget all the dead things she had ever seen, and the things that she loved that were dead, and forget in advance all the dying things she would love in the future, because she simply could not stop caring.

She got in her car, but she didn't go home. She went where she would feel safest.

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A/N Please review...


	2. Chapter 2

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

_When Gregory House was in college, in Professor Bowman's Intro to Philosophy Course, he, like the rest of the class, was given an assignment. The assignment was to answer this question: **''When you die, who do you take with you?''** And while everyone else scrambled their brains to think of a deep, philosophical answer, Gregory House wrote: **''You take the person with whom you made the suicide pact.'' ** _

_And he got an A, because it must be confessed, it **was** an excellent answer._

She was really the last person he expected to see, and yet he was somehow not surprised in the slightest. He knew it was her even before he limped over to the door and pulled it open, because her was of knocking was so familiar; it was tentative and feminine and shy.

Dr. Cameron stood in the hall, hand poised in the air to knock on the door again. But it was open now, and he was staring at her, and so she lowered her hand and bit her lip. She looked tired, and she looked small and pale. She reminded him a little of a doll that someone had misplaced.

''Why?'' was all he said. And why he said that, Gregory House didn't know, it merely seemed an appropriate question to ask. She seemed to think it was a valid question; a bit too broad, but valid nonetheless. Cameron shook her long curtain of hair out of her eyes and stuffed her hands in her coat pockets.

''I can't sleep.''

''It's really no wonder you can't'', he said, tilting his head and observing her nervous body language, ''it's only 8 at night. Too early for most normal people to sleep.''

''No, I mean ever--recently--'' she searched for the right phrasing, but it was coming out scrambled.

''Cameron, out with it. What's really wrong? Are you sick, are you sad, are you lonely, or did you just want to drop by and say hi, and you figure you need an excuse.''

''Do I?'' She asked, looking right at him. The question sounded oddly desperate.

''Don't change the subject. Come in.''

She stepped through the doorway, slipped in lightly, and he noticed that she always moved like water.

''You were looking a particularly lovely shade of exhausted today'', House said, shutting the door behind her. ''And right now you're white as a sheet, but I must say you wear it very well, even if it clashes with your hair.''

''Huh?'' Cameron asked, slipping off her coat and folding it and putting it on the couch, because she was always tragically neat.

''You. Look. Like. Shit. Please tell me what's bothering you, I don't feel like prying. Don't feel like you have to be brave, because you can't pull it off very well. I can read you like a book. I've been around you for awhile, and I know how you work. I can tell when you're thinking too hard, and when you've been crying, and when you're angry but think you shouldn't show it. You aren't that hard to figure out. Every move you make screams an emotion. And right now, your body is yelling for help, even if your mouth won't ask.''

''I'm being haunted.'' She said this simply, the words fell like stones and clattered and echoed in the quiet.

''Haunted...by...'' House waved a hand in the air, ''ghosts, the past, indecision, regret...help me out, it's a little vague..''

Cameron looked furious and strangled, like she was fighting against a rushing current, and losing, being swept out into a cold and angry sea.

''Everything!'' She screamed this, even though she didn't mean to yell that loudly, and she clamped a hand over her mouth. House took a slight step backward, and gave her some space. _Here we go, this won't be pretty_, he thought, and braced himself for the hurricane of emotion about to arrive.

''You--'' she pointed a finger at him, ''were right. Absolutely. Completely. About everything. Me. The world. I'm cursed.''

''Well, that's a bit melodramatic, don't you think?''

''No, no, it isn't. It's true. I'm completely wrong for everything that I am!''

''I'm not sure that was grammatically correct, and it didn't make much sense, but ok, please continue.''

''Stop interrupting and I will!''

''Im trying to add a little levity to the situation. But I promise I'll be quiet now. Continue ranting and crying, please.''

''I used to have funerals for ants that my brother murdered.''

_God of all heaven mighty, where on earth was she going with this? _House really didn't know how to respond to that, and he thought for a moment.

''Ok. You mean he stepped on the ants? I think that would be considered manslaughter rather than cold-blooded murder, but continue. And, feel free to sit Shiva for the spider I killed this morning in the kitchen.''

''Shut-up and listen..you don't get what I'm saying.'' Cameron looked angrier than ever, and her face was getting pink. Her cheeks were, at least. The rest of her face was still unnaturally pale, and so she looked splotchy as well as angry. He would have laughed, but she would probably be very offended and possibly leave. It occurred to him suddenly that he didn't want her to go.

''You aren't _saying_ anything coherent. If you were, then maybe I could listen.''

''My point is, I'm a bad doctor. I feel stuff too much, I care too much. It makes me sad when people die. Yeah, I know, it should make me sad, but not to the point where I can't work or sleep. I shouldn't be feeling like I need to know everyone. But I think it's so wrong that they get up out of their bodies and go where you can't get to them. They, I mean, the actual Them. The real person who was in the body, the soul, whatever, the essence of who they were. The memory of all they loved. And then they leave their empty shells behind, but the eyes still stare, even though there is nothing behind them. And that is the scariest part. The empty look. Because they are gone, and I can't touch them anymore, and I can't find them, because there isn't anything anymore except empty eyes. And that's all I see. And that's why I can't sleep. I can't sleep because I'm looking for them. I want to know where they went, and if they are ok, and make sure it does not hurt anymore. And I never want anyone to go away from me again, but they do. Everything I love dies, because I can only love things that die, because I don't deserve to have anything stay long enough to love me. I don't understand, and god, I'm just so tired.''

She was sitting on the floor. Somewhere during the course of her disjointed and rambling monologue, Cameron had lowered herself down and begun to cry. Her long hair was in her face, and she looked like a trapped and frightened bird, beating its wings violently against the bars of its cage.

What was he going to do now? With this mad, beautiful, tortured, wild, hysterical woman, sitting on his floor and crying like a little child--what on earth would he do?

Nothing. Not anything. Not now. This was a weird sickness, and House wasn't sure where it had begun. It was rather like septic shock; there's a little cut somewhere, you don't pay attention, it gets infected, and you still don't pay attention, and then pretty soon your blood is full of poison and your organs are failing. It takes awhile to build up, but when it does, and you ignore the warning signs, there is hell to pay.

''Come on,'' he said sharply. She didn't respond. Her face was like a blank sheet of paper. He hoped she hadn't finally snapped. He really didn't want to have to visit her in the psych ward, he didn't like it up there at all; it was spooky and sad, and not a good place for a bright young woman.

''Cameron!'' He yelled at her, and she blinked in response. ''I need you to stand up. If you can't stand, then I need you to say something, to show me that you're still in there, and it's all working all right upstairs, because if you can't then I'm going to have to call someone. I don't think you're crazy, and I don't think you're cursed. I think you are tired and I think that you think too much. I think you need to sleep, and I think you need a week off of work, and I think you need to smile more and shop more and drink more tequila and have more sex. I don't think you need any cure other than to live, and stop having funerals for ants that never loved you anyway. God damn it, Alison, say something and stand up, or do one or the other, because you're scaring the shit out of me and it's not a pleasant feeling.''

She slowly stood up, with a face still blank, but with eyes that showed there was a person behind them. He was very grateful, because there were more ways to lose someone other than death, and in some ways, those ways were worse, because the person was still trapped inside the body, but the two were disconnected. And he hated seeing that, and that's why he hated the Psych ward and that's why he was so very grateful, because he wouldn't have to visit her there, after all.

He took her into the bedroom, and she crawled into his bed like she belonged there. She pulled the covers around herself, and she slept.

He sat in a chair on the opposite side of the room and he watched her sleep, watched her chest rise and fall while she breathed and dreamed.

She dreamed about skulls that smiled and bones that danced, of moonlight on water, of autumn leaves. She dreamed she was encased in glass and looking out at an ever-changing landscape. She dreamed that she stood on top of world and cried for every dying thing, and her tears washed away the blood of a million wars, and she felt like she had accomplished something at last by crying.

He fell asleep in the chair as he watched her, but he didn't dream.


	3. Chapter 3

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

A/N Hi and thank you very much to the people who reviewed so far, and I'm very glad you liked it. As for the ''reality'' of it, I'm going to have to apologize in advance for myself, because I have this strange need to drench everything I write with an element of the unreal, or the surreal, if you will. So, therefore:

Extra Disclaimer: This story is fiction about fiction, the copy of a copy, and therefore, at least by Socratic standards, very far removed from actual truth. I tend to write like Pink Floyd tripping on acid while staring at a Salvador Dali painting, and for this I apologize. Don't take it too seriously, it's a fairy tale. Enjoy, read on if you dare...and again to those who reviewed, I love you muchly and think you're fantastic.

Alison was bleary-eyed and confused upon awakening. She wasn't exactly sure where she was, or even when, for that matter. The sky outside the window was gray. It was not raining. It was a dry gray, a sky that didn't have the will to shed a tear, just lingered in its misery.

The room was not hers, and neither was the bed. She had the sudden dull realization, amid her grogginess, that she didn't really care at all whose bed she was in, or how she had come to be there. She pulled the covers back over her head, and nestled her body comfortably among the pillows. She always slept like that, all wrapped up in a nest of blankets, until her body disappeared completely into the fabric. She felt warm.

A door opened later, and it woke her up. She wondered who was arriving, or if someone was leaving. And then she remembered that she had no idea where she was. But there was a door, somewhere, and it was being opened. The covers were still over her head, and she was getting too warm now, and there wasn't much air at all.

She pushed the blankets off of herself with one arm, and felt a rush of cool air fall over her. It was the same room, but the light was dimmer, because the gray sky had finally given up and dissolved completely into a chilly October night. A hand turned on a lamp. There was a _click_, and then illumination. _Let there be light, and there was light. _Terrific, praise god.

Or rather, not god at all. Dr. Gregory House stood next to the bed where Alison Cameron was lying. He stared down at her with eyes that were an uncomfortable shade of electric blue. And then she remembered. Death, and ghosts, and being scared. And work, and hospitals, and stomachaches. And ants drowning in puddles, and faces that seemed to be made of wax. And streets and leaves, and standing in hallways, and doors being opened. And floors, and hands, and a bed and then dreams and then gray and then now and then...here. Good grief.

''What time is it?'' she asked, because it was a practical question. Always important to know the time, regardless of how ridiculous the situation in which you find yourself. It adds a bit of levity.

''It is nine o clock, on a Friday.''

She was still tired. Her arms felt weak and her stomach was empty and tied into knots. She didn't really feel much in the way of emotion, except for a kind of bewilderment. The bewilderment was like a little nervous dog inside her mind, always chasing it's tail and never catching it, never giving up because it was just too dumb to know when to quit.

''I'm sorry.'' Apologize, always, when there is nothing else to say, and after you have asked about the time. She really had to write all these down, and put them in a book. It would sell a million copies, and then she wouldn't ever have to be a doctor again. She could write books about what to do when you wake up at you're boss's place, in his bed, after having a nervous breakdown in his living room. Chapter 1, ask what time it is, Chapter 2, apologize, Chapter 3...there was no chapter three. Shit. It was a rotten plan. There was nothing after ''I'm sorry''. Nothing clear, anyway. She would have to be a doctor after all, not a famous author of self-help books. And she would have to see more bodies, and more death. And then there would be more reasons to have nervous breakdowns in her boss's living room, and fall to the floor and wake up in his bed, and she'd be right back around where she started, with nothing after ''I'm sorry''. Round and round goes the world.

It wasn't fun. ''It's not fun''.

She hadn't even realized that she said it out loud. Marvelous; Chapter 3, Introduce complete non-sequitor immediately after apologizing, it makes everything less awkward.

''No, it isn't. I'm sorry. It isn't fun at all.'' He said this with a clipped kind of exactness that almost resembled nonchalance. It was very factual, very direct. No skirting round an issue to make it seem more comfortable, no buffering the edges of sharp truths to make them hurt less when they stabbed you. He stabbed you with truth but then sewed up the wound. He was wonderful that way, and that was why she fell in love with him, she supposed.

''I wasn't at work today.'' She said this lamely, the statement obvious and completely ridiculous, but it somehow fit into the space after what he said. It was filler, to throw some sound out into the quiet, which was chokingly uncomfortable. To be in the silent space between conversations with this man was like going swimming in a thick wool sweater. It felt heavy and itched like crazy.

''I know. I let you sleep. I told you that you needed a week off of work, and you can have it.'' He was still standing by the bed, except that he had moved back slightly. Alison looked at her hands, and saw that she had to cut her fingernails, because they were growing into jagged and unattractive talons.

''Starting when?'' She pulled her hair back from her face. It felt like a veil that was sitting on her head, her hair; it was limp and dirty and exhausted, much like the rest of her.

''Starting last night.'' Clean, direct, emotionless. Sobering. Like a slap; like going outside in the winter with a wet face, and being blasted by a cruel December wind. She looked up at him, and he made his expression like a stone, and his eyes like ice, just to prove that he was serious.

Nothing after that. Just silence. Then a car alarm went wild, shrieking somewhere down the street, and she was relieved that something had cut the quiet.

''Anything interesting happen today? Any new cases?'' She was buying time, but she didn't know why, and she didn't know the price. She was pulling out her credit card with the thousand-dollar limit and buying time. There would be piles of debt, but she didn't care. She'd take all the time that was available for purchase.

''I won't tell you. I gave you a week off, that means you don't get to know. That means you go home and rest for a week. That means you straighten yourself out, so that you can come back to work and see dead people without falling apart. It happens. People die. And your ants, that you mourn for? Millions of them die for every one of us that goes. It's mostly our shoes that kill them anyway. What are you going to do? You do what you can, you try your best. And if you fail, then you force yourself to forget. I'm sorry. That's it. That's all I can say.'' He wouldn't look at her. He turned around and looked out the window, because nighttime in New Jersey was so terrifically fascinating.

''So, what now?'' She folded her arms across her chest, subconsciously shielding her heart.

''Now you leave.'' Icicles fell from his words, and they shattered on the floor.

''Leave?'' She was echoing, ringing up another purchase of time. Somewhere in the course of the night she had become a time-shopaholic. She didn't want to leave, she didn't want to go anywhere. She wanted to crawl back into the bed, and wrap herself in blankets until she disappeared.

''Yes, go home. Rest. Or if you can't go home, then check into a motel. Drive somewhere nice, get on a plane, I don't really care. I let you stay here all last night and all day. This is not the place where you're going to get better. You can't rest here.''

''I **did**.'' She said this with a kind of vehemence; it came out very acidly and angrily. The words made her tongue burn.

''What?'' This question was drunk with apathy and fatigue, the word was stumbling and couldn't walk a straight line. He kept staring out the window. She felt like flinging herself at him, whether it was because she wanted to throttle him, and hit him, or kiss him and cling to him--she wasn't sure. She was just suddenly full of strong emotions that roared and burned and directed all their energy at this man.

''Rest.'' She pulled herself out of the mess of tangled bedcovers, and realized that she was still in her clothes from the day before. She suddenly felt like she'd fallen for miles and was still falling. It was a rollercoaster with a drop that never ended, and wasn't fun anymore, it was just scary and it hurt.

He didn't say anything. She gathered herself as best she could, standing up on shaking legs. He let her in, last night. And now he was throwing her back out into the same situation, without any real solution to the problem that plagued her, and no cure. He was fantastically cruel to the point of genius. He made an art of making her soul bleed. But still he was all she had, and she felt safe here, in spite of it all.

She moved out of the room, like a shadow passing along the floor. She felt the rug beneath her feet very clearly, she sank into it, and her feet made little imprints that vanished soon after she took another step. Her coat was still sitting on the couch, folded neatly and waiting for her. House didn't say goodbye, he kept staring out the window where there was nothing at all to see.

There was the door. He had opened it and let her in. She rested for a night, and then was put back out into the world with nothing but dull blankness that was feeding on her bones like a cancer. She walked out of the door and into the dark.

She was back where she had first begun. Round and round goes the world. There was a streetlamp buzzing electrically above her like a halo. Her feet were on the pavement, and it was hard and stone and gray. She breathed night air, and it chilled her lungs, and was not refreshing at all. There were leaves again, under her feet. One blew off a tree and whipped through her hair.

A car went by, then a few more. She stood for awhile and watched them. She turned around and looked up at the window. He wasn't standing there anymore, but the light was still on, and it gave her hope. He opened the door once, he might do it again.

It was very cold. The world was huge, and she never really noticed just how large it was before. Nobody ever does, until they are alone in the cold, with nothing to see but night and sky.

An ant ran along the sidewalk, it was carrying a huge crumb of something on its back. Alison saw it, and wished it a long and healthy life.

She took a few steps foreward, and then moved back. Then she moved foreward again, and wondered why any of this had happened in the first place, and if it could have been prevented at all. She could have just not knocked on the door. But she did. And he let her in. And he let her stay, if only for a night, and that was important because it showed something. She didn't know what that something was, just yet, because she was out in the dark--but she took one last look up at the window where the light was still on, and then went to her car.

She climbed inside and turned on the ignition. She blasted the radio and the heat and drove off into the night. She sang at the top of her lungs along with the music because it filled up the silence. She realized that she was crying.

_There are about a million all-night diners in New Jersey. There was one on that particular night that became a temporary haven for a pale, thin young woman, who had dirty hair and jagged fingernails, and clothes that had been slept in. The wonderful thing about diners is that they are always bright and warm, and have coffee and apple pie whenever you need it. _

_Alison Cameron slid into a plastic booth by a window and didn't feel anything. She ordered a cup of coffee and held the ceramic mug tightly in her hands. Steam rose, making dragons in the air before disappearing. _

_She stayed there until the sun came up._

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A/N Aww, I know that was pretty depressing, but things are going to work out, and there's a reason for it all...please review.


	4. Chapter 4

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

It was a strange thing, the way time moved. It was so sluggish that you looked at the nearest clock in a fit of anger and disbelief, thinking, ''is this damn thing _broken_ or what'', or it seemed to be on amphetamines and moving too quickly, knocking things down because it couldn't be calm. Thursday night had been a blur for Gregory House. It was a soft blur, and he was not really sure if time was moving too fast or too slow; if it was on speed, or if it was on valium.

He fell asleep in the chair, feeling strange and exhausted. The sleep was black and deep, and all-consuming and inky.

When he woke up, Alison was still asleep, and she looked pale, but peaceful. She wrapped herself in blankets completely, sometimes pulling them over her head. House pulled them off of her face, because she needed oxygen. He was a doctor. He thought about those things.

He took a shower and went to work. And she was still sleeping, and he looked at her again after he was dressed and leaving, because it was very unusual to see her there, like that, but not unpleasant. And the fact that he didn't think it was unpleasant, well, that was rather unsettling.

That was Friday morning.

By seven o clock on Friday night, there was a dead 13 year old girl whose face was haunting his mind. That part happened very quickly, her dying, and much too quickly. He couldn't stop it. It was rushed. It was a current that ripped the poor girl from life and carried her to whatever came after.

The girl's name was Melissa. There was something off about the way her symptoms presented, the acute worsening. He read her chart a million times, and thought to himself that something didn't add up. Clocks ticked. Mercilessly loud, they ticked and the sound resounded like a death knell. She'd been to many hospitals before, this girl, for many years. She spent her whole life in hospitals, practically. She'd get sick, go in, they'd run tests and come up with different diagnoses that were not conclusive, but it gave those doctors something to write down, so they'd feel they'd done their job. And then she'd get better, and go home, and then she'd get sick again and wind up in a different hospital, with a different diagnosis, and nothing that kept her from getting sick again, because she would always get sick when they let her leave.

This time was different. It was too much, too fast. And there was no time to really see. House noticed that Melissa's mother was a disturbed woman, slightly, but he wrote it off as a woman who was tired of caring for a little girl who never got better. Actually, the mother was the reason she never got better.

Sheila Keefe, mother of Melissa Keefe, suffered from a particularly evil mental infirmity called Munchausens Syndrome By-Proxy. She made her little girl sick, because she liked the attention it got her. She had been systematically poisoning Melissa to death since she was 9 years old. She swore as she was being taken away in handcuffs, after little Melissa's organs had failed and she died in a coma that set in with an astonishing speed, like a cloud blotting out the sun; that she never meant to kill her daughter, she loved her, she was just ''keeping her sick'', never enough to kill her.

The poison had built up to such a toxic level that the last dose of ''medicine'' for Melissa had been fatal.

He missed it, he didn't see it. It happened too damn fast. It was only six o clock on a Friday night, and a little girl who should have been out with her friends, eating pizza and ice cream and going to the movies, was being carried to the morgue, and all because he saw it too late. He could diagnose the black plague or leprosy in New Jersey with more efficiency than he could see the slow murder of a child, and that made him question himself.

The cops were dragging Sheila down the hall, and she was screaming and crying and begging for mercy. She actually broke away from them, and ran to House, clutching at his arm and asking him to forgive her. He slapped her hand away, with more force than he probably should have used, and probably warrented a lawsuit, but he didn't care. He told Sheila Keefe very plainly and coldly that she didn't deserve forgiveness, she deserved to rot in the lowest level of hell.

He left after that. The drive home was lots of colors that were made muddy from being blended together. He stood outside his own door and dry-swallowed two Vicodin before turning the knob. That was the opening door that woke Alison Cameron, where she slept in his bed.

It was two minutes to nine on a Friday night. He realized that Alison was right about seeing the dead eyes. Everything she said was completely true. House was standing in the living room, directly on the spot where she had given her little soliliquey about dead things, and he realized that he had all the same feelings, but he had been around a lot longer and had learned to forget, to block out the dead eyes.

He moved slowly into the bedroom. She couldn't stay here. Some part of him wanted her to, another part knew that he had to help her by making her go. There wasn't really anything else he could do.

Time moved very strangely. It was 30 seconds to nine on a Friday. He reached out and flipped on the light. Alison stirred, and her eyes were foggy and blue when they opened and looked at him.

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Somehow there was no time after that, or there didn't seem to be. She was out the door. He heard it click closed. Her footprints were still on the rug, they hadn't faded completely yet. House moved away from the window, because there was nothing to see at all. He lay down in bed where there was still an imprint of her body. He wrapped the covers around himself, and pulled them over his head. The light was still on, and she saw it from where she stood on the sidewalk, like he hoped she would.

A/N To be continued...


	5. Chapter 5

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

A/N I like to think that every chapter so far has it's own ''voice'', or it's own ''mood'', because that's what I'm trying to get at. It's not really a story about anything in particular, I'm trying to make a mosaic of emotion, and color, and sound and symbols. It's really a journey, a myth, what characters experience and feel, and how it all blends together. Like, some chapters are more soft and dreamy, and others are sharp and harsh, and some, like this one, just convey the hopelessness I think she would probably feel.

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_Sometimes, you wonder why things happened the way they did. You wonder if there was a higher order to anything. A meaning to life and death. _

_Sometimes, you make stupid choices that cause you pain, but turn out to be the right ones. Those dark paths that you walk are frightening, and most of the time you walk them alone, and in the cold. But other times, there are two paths that intersect, and two travelers walking roads paved by their own seperate choices can walk together for awhile._

_Maybe your paths won't take the same turns, the same twists and bends, but eventually you'll find each other again at the end of all roads, because all roads end at the same place._

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When Alison finally straggled back to her apartment building, she realized that she had not been there in two nights. It was Saturday, at around 10 in the morning, sometime at the end of October. The day was sunny; the sky a shock of blue. There was no rain, and there were no clouds. The wind was still chilly though, and everything was cold and bright.

She pulled into the drive. The building was like a square, built three stories high, with apartments on each floor. There was an entrance from the street, leading to a sidewalk which led even further up to the main front doors. These doors opened into a foyer, with elevators, and a stairwell. There was green carpeting and wood furnishings. It was all very pleasant, really, in a nice neighborhood. Mostly adults lived there, businesspeople with careers, but there were also some children.

In the center of the square, there was a courtyard with trees, and even a pool, but that was closed now. Nobody really swam in it in the summer, either. It was always just there, water reflecting light.

She got out of her car and walked from the street, to the sidewalk which led to the main front doors. But when she got about halfway there, she noticed that something was odd. There was a whole group of people, standing around and lingering; the kind of lingering that occurs after some kind of tragedy.

Alison wondered blankly if someone had died.

Mr. Alberti was the landlord. He shared the name of a famous architect during the Italian Renaissance who proclaimed that ''men could do all things if they willed it.'' But this Alberti did not have the same Humanistic sensibilities. He didn't really think people were good for much of anything. He was about five foot six, and round all over. He had thick, dark hair that resembled a bad wig, and ridiculously bushy eyebrows that looked like caterpillars sewn onto his face. He always wore a suit and tie, but he sweated alot, was perpetually flustered, and had verbal tics. He was ugly, and nobody really liked him. He reminded Alison of a beetle.

Alberti was now standing by the front doors, looking disgustedly at the crowd which had gathered. Some were people who lived in the building, and others were those who had just wandered off the street to see what the fuss was about. There was always a fuss when someone died.

Alison pushed her way past them and tried to get through to the doors. Alberti noticed her, and his beady eyes lit up. The caterpillars above them twitched, as if in an epileptic seizure. ''Alice!'' He said, rushing over to her and grabbing her arm with his fat hand. He always called her Alice, no matter how many times she told him it wasn't her name. ''Duuurrrrr!'' He made a sound like a lawnmower roaring to life. Spit flew everywhere. He looked pathetic, and more ugly and red-faced and beetle-like than she had ever seen him.

''What happened?'' Alison asked, even though she already knew the end of the story. Someone died. But she had missed the middle part, like how, and why, and who.

''Alice, Alice'', Alberti tried for a minute to be friendly, and he put a hand on her shoulder, but then thought better of it and pulled away. ''I'm afraid there's been an accident, and there's been some...damage to your apartment.''

Her mind whirred like a blender. ''Was I robbed?'' Maybe nobody died at all. Maybe her TV and stereo were just missing.

Alberti led her through the front doors and down the hall to another corridor, where her apartment was, on the ground level, with a window that faced the courtyard. The door was open slightly. She pushed it open the rest of the way gingerly with her foot, as if she was terrified of what she would find.

There was water all over everything; the couch was ruined, and so was the carpet on the floor. The ceiling sagged under the weight of what appeared to be a flood in the apartment upstairs. Except that the water was tinged slightly pink.

''Wha--'' she started to ask, and then Alberti sighed and jumped right into an explanation of sorts.

''Jack Harper offed himself last night. Climbed into the bathtub and slit his wrists. He died, of course, and never even bothered to turn off the water before he kicked it.'' Alberti seemed to think this was a terrible thing. Not that a man would be driven to suicide, but that he wouldn't bother to clean up after himself.

Jack Harper was thin, and balding prematurely. He was an accountant, 36 years old, ordinary, but a little nervous and sensitive. Alison was only ever in his apartment once. She went to borrow sugar and ended up staying three hours. He talked for a long time, about a lot of things, and she felt that he was lonely. His eyes were brownish-gray, and kind, and simple. His face was friendly and unextraordinary. Jack Harper's most prized possession was a cooking pot given to him by his brother before he died of kidney failure. The cooking pot was mysteriously imprinted with an image of the Virgin Mary.

Before Jack Harper killed himself, he left an exceptionally neat and orderly note, carefully dictating what was to be done with all of his belongings. He wanted all his money to go to the United Way, all his apartment furnishings and clothes to Goodwill, except the pot with the Virgin Mary, which was to go to Dr. Alison Cameron, who lived in the apartment downstairs.

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Alison went through her things, walking over the spongey wet carpet that squashed under her feet and soaked her socks right through her shoes. She packed a bag with a bunch of clothes, and a toothbrush, and a comb. She took a copy of a book, too, _A Farewell To Arms_ by Ernest Hemingway. She did this all very mechanically, like it didn't matter at all.

She asked Alberti when they were going to take Jack Harper's body away, and he told her that they already did.

''I guess this is for you, honey'', said a soft, gravely voice. It was Irene. She lived on the third floor. She had been an office manager for 30 years, and she smoked about a thousand cigarettes a day. Alison liked her. Irene handed Alison Cameron the miracle cooking pot. Inside was another note. It read:

_Dear Dr. Alison,_

_I want you to have this, because you remind me of the Mother Of God. She was the only one I could ever talk to, because she really listened. It will bring you luck. Just don't cook in it._

_Sincerely,_

_Jack Harper_

Alison looked back into her apartment. The floor was wet and the couch was wet, droplets of red water were seeping from the wound in the ceiling.

They'd fix it, Alberti assured her, and Irene nodded and lit a cigarette. He told her though, that she better find another place to stay for awhile. Irene said that she could stay with her, but Alison replied no thanks, she'd find a place.

She gathered her bag, and her book, and the miracle cooking pot, and headed back out into the cold, bright day, with the unfeeling blue sky.

''Alice!'' Alberti's reedy voice called after her, and she turned around. ''Get some sleep, you look like death.''

Alison nodded her head limply. Irene waved to her while crushing the cigarette under her shoe.

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She was back in the car again, now with no home, just a bag of clothes, and a week of vacation that she didn't really want at all, now, as well as a battered copy of _A Farewell To Arms, _and the pot that the dead man left her.

Alison picked up said pot, which was lying on the seat next to her. It was copper, nothing fancy. On the side there was a sort of shimmery-colored rainbow oval shape, from where someone had left it on the stove too long. It didn't look like the Virgin Mary at all. It looked like a bruise.

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She drove to Cape May Point, which is situated at the very tip of New Jersey. There is a beach there, with sand that is sharp and cuts bare feet with astounding ease. There are jaggedy rocks on that beach, and the water is always choppy and mean, no matter what the weather. Out there, in the choppy water, there is a half-sunk battleship. It has been there for a long time, and nobody has ever moved it, and it will probably be there forever.

Nobody was there on the beach with her, that bright, cold, Saturday in late October; nobody except an old man, wrapped from head to toe in scarves and jackets and rags and scaps of cloth. He was homeless; a walking patchwork quilt sewn by the hand of circumstance.

Alison looked out at the water.

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Three hours later, she was back where she started. It was four o clock in the afternoon, and she was standing in front of a familiar door, wondering whether or not to knock. She'd been stuck in a centrifuge. Round and round goes the world. You always ended up exactly where you started, no matter how great the distance you traveled in between departure and return. Nothing ever escaped the circle, nobody ever fell out of the loop.

She knocked on the door.

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Gregory House pulled it open, and stared at her. Alison had an expression like an abandoned shopping center, where shells of buildings struggled to find the strength to remain standing. Her eyes were flickering like a neon sign outside a motel, alone on a dark highway flashing ''vacancy'', ''vacancy'', wishing someone would come and stay.

She'd been to the edge of the world and back, and her hair smelled like the ocean. She held a bag, and an old book and a cooking pot in her hands. She was clinging to these miscellaneous things like they were all she had left, and she was afraid that they would be suddenly snatched away.

He moved aside, and let her in.

A/N Please review...


	6. Chapter 6

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

_In 1988, when he was still a relatively young doctor, relatively handsome, and with full use of his leg, Gregory House was on call, working in the ER of a hospital that was on his resume, but whose name had vanished from his memory, washed away by the waters of Lethe. Snow was drifting down lightly, because it was December. And, like on most snowy nights, if you looked up at the sky, it appeared orange-white, like a creamsicle. A young girl was rushed in on a gurney. She was small, with limbs like brittle tree branches. Her hair was long and straight and brown. There was blood coming from her mouth, and she couldn't speak. She moaned, and choked and gasped, her face white, and her eyes blinking as if sending out an SOS in Morse Code. She had swallowed 37 stray pins, and she died practically in his arms. Her name was Mary Elizabeth. Mary after the Mother of Jesus, Elizabeth after the mother of John the Baptist. Mary Elizabeth was fifteen years old. She was wearing pink leg warmers. Her blood would never wash out of his white lab coat. It was not an easy thing to do, swallowing 37 pins. It required persistance. Gregory House never wore a lab coat again after that night._

Alison blinked at him. She was still holding onto all the things she brought with her, the bag, the book, and the pot. They were sitting on the couch, she and he, side by side, though not really touching. They weren't making any special extra effort not to touch, either. It was somehow understood that even if by mistake they did, it would be fine.

''What's with the cookware?'' House gestured to the copper pot she was holding.

''A man in my apartment building killed himself. He lived upstairs from me. He slit his wrists in the bathtub, and the water ran all night long, and flooded his apartment. And then it bled through the ceiling, and it flooded mine. Everything was ruined.'' Alison's voice sounded like the wind, airy and clear.

''That explains the bag you're carrying, which I assume is full of your stuff, but not the pot. Did you try to bail out the water with it, or something?'' House attempted light humor, but it didn't really have any effect. Her expression was still blurry, like a mirage in the desert.

''No. He left it to me, because I was nice to him, I guess. Because I listened to him. One day, at least, when he needed to talk, I listened. He probably needed to talk a lot more times after that, and there was nobody there. The pot is supposed to be sacred, or something. The Virgin Mary appeared in it.''

''Old girl just pops up everywhere, doesn't she? Potato chips, sticky buns, bars of soap, sides of buildings, and now copper pots.'' He held out a hand. ''Let me see.''

She passed it over to him. He inspected it closely. ''That, there?'' House pointed to the little oval rainbow smudge. Alison nodded.

''That doesn't even look like her. I mean, I don't know the lady personally, but I've seen some nice statues. This is a crappy likeness. Some guy went to cook soup, got drunk, and let it burn. And there's a neat little mark left over, and because he was still drunk, he saw the Virgin Mary, because that's what he needed to see at the moment. And then he fell asleep and in the morning when he woke up, the soup was cold and the mark was there, and even though he was slightly more sober, he still saw the Virgin Mary, because it comforted him to believe that she visited him. It became a wonderful delusion, and myth sprang up around it. And really all it was, was just an ordinary cooking pot. The thought that it could be miraculous gave him hope, and he could never really see it for what it was again after that, because it would be such a disappointment.''

It was a crappy and rambling explanation, but it seemed to suffice.Alison's features became more readable now, and she looked less like a Picasso and more like a Boticelli.

''I don't have anyplace to go. I'm back where I started.'' Her shoulders didn't shrug, but the words did. The words shrugged and threw up their hands, because they'd had enough, and they were tired.

''Maybe you don't have to go anywhere. Maybe that's the point. Maybe you're where you need to stay, for awhile.'' House said this without realizing it. After it was said, he watched the statement hanging in the air, and he studied it, and picked it apart, and came to the conclusion that yes, he meant it completely.

''Would you mind? If I stayed here with you, I mean. You gave me a week off of work, and it will probably take at least that long to fix the roof at my place.''Alison looked at him. ''And it's really your fault that I'm back here at all. If you had never let me in the first night, I would have gone home. And maybe then poor Jack wouldn't have killed himself, because I would have been there if he needed to listen.''

''We'll never know what could have happened if I never opened the door, if I left you standing there. Maybe Jack would still be alive. Maybe you would have saved one more ant from drowning. But at what cost to you? You'd still be seeing ghosts, and you would still be afraid. And you would never have rested for a night, and I would never have been able to watch you sleeping. No matter how many ants we could have saved, I wouldn't trade that for anything. Make me responsible for everything, I don't care. I just know that I could never not open the door.''

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She sat in the kitchen, later. Lights were glowing warmly. She was sitting cross-legged on a chair, eating vanilla ice cream. She told him about when she was young, and she called it banilla ice cream, because she had trouble saying the letter ''v''. Vanilla was banilla, and volleyball was bolleyball, and so forth. He had to crack a smile at that, because of the mental picture of her as a little girl, with pigtails and missing teeth, demanding banilla ice cream. It was sweet. It was a nice picture. Everything was ok and nice and sweet for that moment.

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Alison took a shower that seemed to last for days. She emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, skin pink and hair dripping water all over the floor. There was a tapping sound against the window. It was rain. She walked over, across the carpet, and her feet sank in and pressed their imprints. She looked out and down to the sidewalk. For a second she had the strangest feeling that she was still out there, looking up at the window. But when she looked up this time, she saw her own silhouette there, juxtaposed against the light. Round and round goes the world.

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Saturday night was rapidly merging into Sunday morning. They passed into each other, and as they did, it became the end of October. October 31st. Halloween. In Celtic mythology, it was called Samhain, summer's end, because summer had died, it was being sacrificed on a pyre, and that's why autumn always smells like smoke. It was the feast of the dead. People set food out for the souls that were returning, because the veil between the worlds was thin. These were their loved ones, passing by to say hello and have a bite to eat.

Greg and Alison were both sitting on the bed. They weren't really close to each other in physical proximity, she was sitting cross legged, he was lying on his back a few inches from her. Her hair was slowly starting to dry, but the imprints of her feet were still on the rug.

Alison was holding the battered old book she had brought with her, the one by Ernest Hemingway. The pages were yellow, and she didn't feel like reading it, because she knew how it ended. It ended with death and rain. Hemingway was a minimalist to the point of annoyance, but noone did it better than him. Noone else could say so much by saying so little. You could be a great minimalist only if your words were powerful enough. And there are two incredibly powerful words in the English language. They are powerful on their own, and together their power is nearly incomprehesible, and unmatched. These words are: death and rain.

''Tell me about Egypt'', Alison prompted, setting the book down. ''I know you used to live there. What was it like?''

''I hated it'', he replied, ''it was too hot.''

''Did you see the Nile?''

''Everyone who has ever been to Egypt has seen the Nile. They have to go to see it, just to say they've seen it. It's like an obligation.'' House sighed, then said,

''It's overrated. It's just a long, filthy river with a lot of grotesque, mutated things living in it. It's the same as every other river in the world; the same as the Hudson, or the Mississippi. It's just water that flows forever and ever.''

''I went to Greece when I was in college'',Alison said. ''I saw the Parthenon. I cried looking at it.''

''You seem to cry at alot of things that don't deserve your tears. It's a bunch of broken columns. Ancient Greece wasn't that great a culture anyway.''

''They gave us medicine, practically. They gave us art and philosophy. They gave us rational thought.''

''Yes, because I'm certain that human beings never thought rationally before they learned how to tie a toga.''

''You know what I mean'',

''Yeah, I know what you mean. I just had to be deliberately difficult.''

''I know. I forgive you. No, I cried because it felt very old. Haven't you ever walked in a place that had a lot of history, and wondered about all the people who stood in the very same spot?''

''I actually once stood on the beach in Normandy, France. And, like you said, I felt that way. I thought how the world had changed where I was standing. I wrote my name in the wet sand with my finger. I wrote 'Greg House was here'. And then the water moved up the beach and shifted the sand, and my name disappeared. Really, I was never there at all.''

He reached for her hand, and held it for the briefest second, then let go. She was scarcely sure she felt it at all.

Quiet and night enveloped the room. Alison loved the feeling of cool darkness. Inside her soul she felt velvet and black and as deep and peaceful and ancient as the sky. She was on top of the covers now, and so was he. She was visible, she didn't need to disappear. He was asleep, breathing deeply and evenly, and she was watching him now, instead. There was nothing else to do but dream right at that moment, because the world was turning round and it was rocking her to sleep.

Broken columns, shifting sands, beaches and rivers, and the persistance of water. Harsh suns and deep cool nights. These were the images that swirled through her mind until they were a blur and she couldn't remember anything except the opening of a door.

A/N Please review...


	7. Chapter 7

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

_When Alison Cameron was a little girl, she liked to read. She was one of those. One of those girls who always look slight and small; a little like a doll. A doll with eyes that seem old. You see them in the library, these little girls, clutching a book like a lifeline. These little girls are lonely. They see more and feel more than most people. They observe and absorb more. _

_Every Halloween, from the time she was 12 to the time she was 15, Alison dressed like a famous character from literature. At 14, she decided to be Hester Prynne, from ''The Scarlet Letter'' by Nathanial Hawthorne. It was an ambitious undertaking. She had a fabulous costume, though, with full Puritan garb in all its starched and holier than thou glory. She made a red ''A'' for ''adulteress'' out of felt, and glued it to the front of the dress. The dress was a shapeless black thing that her grandmother wore to funerals. Alison had a little white cap, made of a dishtowl that she wrapped around her head. She carried a plastic baby doll with her, wrapped in a blanket, and she bribed her next door neighbor and chem lab partner Norman to dress up and go trick or treating with her, as the Reverand Arthur Dimmsdale. Norman had a face like a slice of bologna. His hair was like wet straw. She paid him 20 dollars, which was her hard-earned babysitting money. By the end of the night, it had started to rain. The red felt ''A'' had fallen off of her costume, and the bastard child baby doll was missing. Her bag had broken, and there was candy all over the sidewalk. The Good Reverand Dimmsdale had left her for a girl dressed in a Wonderwoman costume. Alison realized then that she was different._

_The next year, she didn't go out. She stayed in and watched TV, but she still wore a costume, and she was still a famous character from literature. She wore a red hunting hat, with earflaps on the sides that covered her ears. She was Holden Caulfield, from ''The Catcher in the Rye.'' She wasn't so different, then. Everyone was Holden Caulfield at 15, whether they wore a costume or not._

Alison was sitting in the kitchen, in Gregory House's apartment. It was Sunday, and Halloween. The weather was crisp and attractively moody. There were clouds in the sky and there was a bite to the air. She looked around.

The kitchen was nice. Kitchens were always nice. It had something to do with the comfort of food, Alison supposed. There was nothing better than drinking something warm in a brightly lit kitchen, while the outside of the world was mean and dark and cold. There was an element of safety to it. It felt like being in a cozy bubble.

She was thumbing through a book on Arthurian legends that she found on the shelf. It seemed to stick out, because it wasn't the sort of thing she would figure House liked to read. She looked at the inside of the cover, and saw a stamp mark. It was a library book. In between some of the pages were notes for what looked like a high school student's report on King Arthur. She recognized the handwriting. The paper that the notes were written on was yellow and pressed incredibly flat. It had been there for a very long time. She looked at the date scrawled in the upper righthand corner. _November 18th, 1975._ There were initials, too. _G. H._

Alison looked at the due date, stamped clearly in bright blue on a card in the back of the book. **October 31, 1975**. It was from a library in Danbury, Connecticut. It had never been returned. It was stuck on a shelf, gathering dust and waiting for her to find it. Thirtysomething years later to the day it was supposed to go back. This made her smile. It made her feel, for whatever reason, that she was where she was supposed to be.

House was still asleep. He would probably sleep all day if she let him, and she probably would. He looked remarkably innocent when he was sleeping, but there was a something almost like desperatness to his expression. Like he was fighting waking up, fighting morning, fighting dreams, fighting everything. Like the man in the Bible who restled with God in his sleep. Yeah, that guy. Alison figured that if she could have watched that man's face while he slept and battled god, it would very much resemble Gregory House's face while he slept and fought everything. But there was also that undercurrent of delicate softness to his expression, while his eyes were closed in dreaming. And the mix of innocence and despair made it almost impossible to look away; almost impossible to watch him and not think that in those moments he really was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

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_Alison loved the candle stores, the kind that were in malls. She called them the candle stores because they mostly sold candles, but they also sold other things, depending on the season. There were little knicknacks and odd and ends, things you buy as presents for people that you don't really know very well, and aren't very close too. Little wreaths, and candle holders, and ceramic animals, and wooden things that were painted and smelled like balsam. The air in those stores was always very fragrant, and comforting. Smell is the sense most closely tied to memory. Alison remembered being young and in one of those stores. She went around and picked up all the scented candles, which came in big glass votive jars with labels on them. She smelled all of them. Her favorites were the one that smelled like lilac, because it was like a heavy summer night; the one that smelled like pine trees, because it was like walking downstairs on Christmas morning; and the one that smelled rich and spicy, spooky and ancient, because it was like a perfect autumn day. _

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She was reclining on the couch, feet propped up on a pillow, reading a book. That's how Gregory House saw Alison Cameron when he first woke up that day, finally. He limped out of the bedroom, clad in sweatpants and a wrinkled, gray t-shirt. His hair was sticking out from his head, messy from sleep. His leg felt like it wanted to fall off. It always felt like that when he woke up, that was when it hurt the most. That was when the pain was the most biting and aching and gnawing and restless and vicious and constant. That was why he fought in his sleep. He fought to stay there and not wake up and face another day of this.

She was wearing reading glasses. Her hair was pulled back loosely in a ponytail. Her skin was still pale, but it was a clean sort of paleness, the just-washed-my-face kind of pale that's rather becoming on a woman. Her feet were in socks, resting on a pillow. Her socks had sunflowers on them. She had sweatpants on, and a baggy green sweater. She looked perfect. He looked away. He needed Vicodin.

Alison put the book down. House recognized it. He checked it out of a library in Connecticut about thirty years ago and never returned it. He just carried it around with him; wherever he moved to after that, the book followed, at the bottom of a box, or in a closet, or tucked way back on a shelf gathering dust. She had unearthed it. It was some crap King Arthur thing, and why she found it, or why it found her, he didn't know.

''Good morning'', she said, plain and pleasant.

''Hey'', he said. House had found the bottle of Vicodin. He opened the cap, and shook out two pills. They were white and pretty against the palm of his hand.

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''Do you know that King Arthur and Guinevere are supposedly buried at Glastonbury, in England?'' Alison asked him. She appeared interested by the subject, and it appeared that she felt he should be, as well.

''No'', he said, ''they aren't.'' He was looking for sugar. He could never remember where he put it, even in his own damn kitchen.

''How do you know?'' She demanded. She was leaning against the countertop, and her face had that pouty, indignant expression that made her look about five years old.

''Has _anybody_''--House slammed a drawer rather violently--''ever actually _gone_''--he yanked open a cabinet--''out there and dug them up and said yes, this is _definately_''--and searched through it with equal violence--''King Arthur and Guinevere, who may or may not have existed at _all_''--spoons went flying and clattered to the floor.

Alison reached up, opened a cupboard, and pulled out a canister of sugar. She handed it to him with lips pursed very thinly. ''No.''

''No'', he said, accepting it. ''People want to believe that they are buried out there, because it sounds nice and romantic.''

''But doesn't it, though?'' She asked this with genuine curiosity.

''Not to me''. House poured sugar into black coffee. The spoon clanked against the sides of the mug as he stirred it.

''Why are you so upset?''

''I don't know.''

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It was Halloween night. Somewhere, out where people had lives, those people were dressing their kids up in costumes, and painting their little faces. They were handing out candy and going to parties. They were cuddling on couches, watching scary movies. They were eating too much candy, and not thinking about death at all. They carved out pumpkins, and stuck candles inside, because that was just what you did. Never mind that it was originally intended to be a lantern, to light the way for the souls of the dead who were passing by. Leave death and old folklore and pagan superstition out of holidays. Forget what they all really meant. Festivals of nature, of the seasons, of the sun and the moon, of life, and of death. That's what it all came back around to. But hell, nobody wants to think about life and death. Lets have candy, and all will be well.

Alison and Greg had seen real death. They had seen real tragedy. They were haunted, and wanted to bury the dead and forget. However, they couldn't block out the honesty of a holiday all about death, paradoxically, because they _had_ seen so much of it.

They sat together, side by side on the couch. This was a habit. They never really touched directly unless they had to. They were always side by side and together but never touching. This was what it was.

A moon rose. It was full and bright and orange.Alison didn't say anything. She was thinking about poor Jack Harper. The miracle pot was in the kitchen now, in a cabinet. Holy relic or not, Alison couldn't bring herself to keep it where she could see it.

Gregory House was thinking about a thousand things. Images that swirled and moved in and out of focus. He kept them at a distance though, where they couldn't really become clear. It was like watching a gray curtain moving in the breeze.

A/N Please review...


	8. Chapter 8

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

A/N: This chapter should be read very carefully. It took me a very long time to write. It may seem a bit disjointed, but it is intended to be that way. I have themes for this story, and a plan for its completion. I have been gradually introducing the themes and objects and symbols that recur, only because that is necessary. For everyone who has read so far, and reviewed, I thank you very much. I hope this story speaks to you. I'd like my reviewers and readers to please do something for me, because Im interested. Could you please, when you read, focus on the emotions and images in it, and tell me what you got out of them, if anything. Be honest, please. I hope you like it.

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_In college, Gregory House took a course in Psychology. He spent most of the lecture time sleeping. One day, the professor was rattling on about dissociation. Blocking something out to the point where something in your mind cracked. You started to have blackouts. You started to miss time. You started to miss everything, because you couldn't feel anything. And, if it was really advanced, you sometimes developed multiple personalities, because your mind cracked into a whole bunch of pieces. The professor told a story about a man who was in a hospital. The poor guy had dissociated from his leg. Not his whole body, just his leg. He couldn't figure out what the hell it was. He saw it as this alien thing that didn't belong in bed with him. And so, he tried to pick it up and throw it out of the bed. However, it **was** a part of his body, and when the sad bastard tried to throw his leg out of bed to get it away from him, he ended up flinging his whole body to the floor in the process. They would pick him up, and put him back in bed, and he would be very confused. And then the whole thing would start all over again, and he'd wind up back on the floor. That particular day, in 1978, Gregory House thought it was the funniest damn thing he had ever heard. He laughed himself sick, and then he walked out of the lecture hall, still laughing like a loon. He found himself laughing even when he went for a run around the college's track, and he'd have to pause and catch his breath before he could continue to run again. Now, Gregory House doesn't run anymore. And he looks back on that day, and he can't understand why he thought it was so funny at all._

Mondays were never fun. Mondays were, and always would be, crap. Gregory House didn't want to get up and go to work on Mondays, or any other day for that matter. He didn't really want to get up at all, ever.

Alison Cameron was living in his apartment. He couldn't figure out why he opened the door and let her in. He didn't even remember exactly what happened. It had been the previous Thursday. He saw her at work earlier. She looked a lovely shade of dreadful, and he told her so, when she showed up later at his doorstep. She sat on the floor and she cried. Death, death, death, etcetera. Memento moris everywhere.

He felt gray. He felt sharper than usual. He felt like a nail file; rough. He felt like sandpaper. He felt like nothing good and everything bad.

It was the day after Halloween. Someone smashed a pumpkin in the street. It's guts were all over the sidewalk. The pumpkin was dead. Hurray.

House was lying in bed. His leg felt like it had been crushed by a ten-story building. He rolled over and smashed his face into the pillow. Maybe if he lay like that for long enough, he would suffocate.

No such luck, because Alison had just come into the room. Most nights she slept on the couch, and let him sleep in his own bed. Which was really kind of her, him being crippled and all. She was a thoughtful thing, she lived to serve, she--

Pulled aside the curtains and blasted sunlight in his eyes. Bitch.

He was terrifically cranky. He needed something to snark at, to vent some cynicism. She'd do.

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He insulted her to the point where he felt better and worse at the same time, and that's when he knew it was time to draw the line. He picked at every little thing she did in that half hour period they were together before he left to be a doctor, and she stayed behind in his apartment. She was a doctor too. She was on vacation. He was her boss and he told her to take a week off. She ended up moving in.

Alison just looked at him while he left. She knew he was being unnecessarily cruel because he was in pain. She always knew that, and understood. She was interesting that way.

She loved him. God only knew why. He didn't know how he felt. It was all blank and gray and felt like sandpaper. He fucking hated Mondays.

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There was nothing interesting. Nothing at all. Nobody was dying for once. Well, nobody he was treating, anyway. People were dying by the dozens all over the world, and taking millions of ants with them. Ha, ants. Alison and her ants. She was trying to save everything, preserve everything, coat it with purpose and an assurance of love and caring and empathy. It would never work. It threw her down crying on his floor, and made her haunted and grieving. Saving things from drowning never got you anywhere. Some times it was better to turn away while they were taken under by the current.

Chase was chewing on a pencil. Chase was blonde and looked like a Ken doll. He was young and handsome and Australian. And a doctor. And a lapsed Catholic with daddy issues. The girls loved him. He was like candy to them.

House threw a paper cup across the room, just because he was feeling miserable and wretched, and because Chase was sitting there and looking so pretty and healthy and whole and blonde and young and everything that House could never be. House felt old and broken and rough. He felt like a cracked mirror.

The paper cup smacked Chase in the head. _Score! Bulls-eye_. Right on that pretty blond head.

Chase stood up and announced that he was leaving. As well he should. It was five o clock in the evening, and nobody had come to them, seeking aid. Nobody was mysteriously dying and needed their help. Nobody needed to be saved.

Foreman shook his head. He knew when to ignore and shrug it off and when to be noncommital. Foreman made House angry too. Everything made House angry right at that moment. Even the rug made him furious, just by existing in the universe at all.

House left. He left the hospital feeling gray and angry and sad. He felt like blocking everything out until his mind snapped and he could fall into numbness and not feel a damn thing.

He arrived back home. She was still there. She was always there. She probably would always be there. He wasn't sure how he felt about that. House wasn't sure how he felt about anything at all. He hated Mondays.

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_Monday gave way to Tuesday, as it always did. Monday was cruel and biting, and Tuesday seemed kind and gentle in comparison. Alison did not particularly mind the fact that Gregory House had directed all of his misanthrope and anger at her that Monday morning. She simply accepted the fact that it was something he did. It was commonplace. _

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On that same Monday, the first of November, All Saints Day, Alison Cameron stood in the empty apartment after House had left. She looked around. It seemed to have a kind of stillness, like a cathedral. She moved around, picking things up and putting them down. She read another chapter in _A Farewell to Arms_, and it made her stomach hurt, because it was just so simple and sad. She looked again at the book of Arthurian legends, the library book that was years overdue. She read about Merlin, and how he was trapped in a crystal cave. Alison had the image of Merlin as a wild thing caged, struggling to free itself. The Merlin she saw in her mind's eye was blue eyed and scruffy, with a tall, thin body and long legs. Somewhere in this daydream, Alison became the Lady of the Lake; clear and translucent and ancient and deep as water. She held onto Excalibur, held it safe in her watery arms, long before it would ever be trapped in the stone.

All these things she thought of as the time passed. Alison eventually set that book down and stood up again. She straightened cushions and made the bed. She rinsed out coffee mugs and put them in the dishwasher. She sat back down on the couch again and turned on the TV. A movie channel was playing that sad movie about Beethoven, _Immortal Beloved._ She watched until the end and tears were on her face, sitting like little pearls. She switched the channel, where there was another movie playing. It was an adaptation of _The Scarlet Letter_, starring Demi Moore as Hester Prynne. Alison thought vaguely that Arthur Dimmsdale looked a lot like Beethoven. Then she realized it was the same actor. He certainly looked better than Norman ever had.

Alison switched off the TV, after that movie ended. She didn't feel like sitting any longer. Her body was getting numb from being still. She got up and walked around, to get the blood flowing back into her limbs. She walked into the bathroom and realized that she didn't have much more shampoo. The bottle that she had brought with her was very nearly empty.

She left a note for House, just in case he should come back early, saying simply that she had gone out shopping, and would be back soon. She grabbed the extra key he always kept in the drawer and looped it onto her keychain, where it dangled beside her car keys.

The radio in the car was playing something bouncy and fun. She switched the station. Maroon 5. That was more her speed, right now. Then their song ended, and REM came on. She recognized the opening chords to ''Man On the Moon''. She knew the refrain, and she sang along with it. By the time that song has ended, and ''You're Beautiful'' by James Blunt had started to play, Alison pulled into the parking lot of the nearest supermarket. She turned off the ignition, and James Blunt's voice disappeared. It was just as well. That was a pretty song, but very sad. Alison didn't feel like bouncy and fun, but she didn't want sad and pretty, either. She wanted something in between.

Alison wandered the aisles, pushing a shopping cart. She bought a tube of lipstick in a color she would probably never wear. She picked out three apples, and two pears. She bought a carton of milk, and several cans of soup. She bought a box of pasta. Yes, she did buy the shampoo, which she originally came to get. But that was the last thing she put in the cart, and she had almost forgotten about it. Life was very much like this, it seemed, all the time. She set out with a clear plan and destination in mind, and wound up arriving there after a million detours that seemed more important than getting to where she needed to go.

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She got back to the apartment, but the door was still locked and he wasn't home. Alison used the key to let herself in. The sun was shining through the blinds on the windows, and there were lines of light across the floor. The note she had left for House was still sitting on the table, and she crumpled it up.

Alison put the apples and pears in the refrigerator; she nestled them in beside a head of lettuce that looked a thousand years old. It was an old-man lettuce head. She picked it up with careful fingers, and then threw it away. The apples and pears were shiny and new. They looked like wax fruit.

She put the milk away, and the soup, and the pasta. She tried the lipstick on, frowned, and wiped it off.

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Alison looked through House's collection of vinyl records. She picked up an album by The Doors. Alison always had a strange kind of fondness for Jim Morrison. He looked mad and fragile and wild, like a bird born a thousand years before its time, falling into extinction before it ever got the chance to fly. He was sad. He died in Paris, and nobody knew exactly why, or what of. That was all legend now. Some people even said he was still alive somewhere, and ok. His grave is in Paris. It's like a monument. People go and make pilgrimages there, as if he were a saint. Alison believed that he probably was.

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Alison picked up The Eagles' _Hotel California._ She remembered being 20 years old, sitting outside on the college campus with her friend Max. Max had sharp eyebrows, cerulean blue eyes, and glasses. He always wore a black baseball cap. Max played that song on his guitar, and it didn't seem as dark, or spooky as it usually did when she listened to it alone, at night. The sun was warm; it was May. The grass was green, and everything smelled like early summer, and was happy. The day felt like lemonade, and hot dogs and ice cream. It felt like everything wonderful and nothing bad. Alison set the record down. She was crying. Tears were falling like flower petals from her eyes. That was how House found her, when he walked in that Monday night. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by most of his record collection, crying. She cried, and it looked almost soft and delicate and pretty. Like she was under the sun, surrounded by flower petals, but with a gray-white face full of pain. She was like those statues of the Virgin Mary which wept tears of blood; those statues that people made pilgrimages to, to kneel in front of, and be healed.

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_Many saints, and the deeds they've done, the wondrous things and miracles they accomplished while on earth, have become obscured by legend. They were seen as glowing half-human, half-divine beings, on fire with something higher than themselves. Really, they suffered terribly. They suffered more than most people, for whatever reason._

_They died in fantastic ways; because the death of a saint was always dramatic. It was like they were going home, after a business trip they didn't want to take at all. They made incredible exits that always hurt. St. Catherine had every bone in her body broken on a circular wheel, St. Lucy had her eyes removed, St. Peter was crucified upside down. Joan of Arc, interestingly enough, was burned as a heretic by the very church which would later declare her a saint. _

_Cameron really liked Saint Peter, because he was so human. _

_His best friend was this miracle-worker from a nowhere town, born in a barn surrounded by pigs and sheep. He talked in parables and everyone listened, but not everyone liked what they heard. They took Peter's best friend, whose name was Yeshua, away to be publicly executed. Peter was scared, because he didn't want to get dragged into all of it. He knew it would someday come down to this, and his pal Yeshua knew it too. Yeshua told their whole gang one night over dinner on a Thursday that he was going to be killed. And not only that, but that he'd be betrayed. By one of them. Everyone at the table choked on their wine and started muttering and pointing fingers. Peter was shy. He was simple. He was just a fisherman. This guy Yeshua was pretty spooky, but even Peter had to admit, there was something to him. Yeshua was the one who started calling him Peter in the first place. Before that, he was just Simon. Peter didn't want to lose the one best friend he ever had, so he rambled out something about how he would never, ever, in a million billion years betray his best pal, even if he had to die with him. _

_But when it came down to it, and Yeshua was being hauled away to die, Peter swore three times he didn't know the guy, never seen him before, never even heard of him. He was just some nut running around, spouting off parables and healing cripples and causing trouble. No, he was no friend of his. Peter felt really rotten after that._

_Yeshua and his gruesome death on a Friday became the stuff of legend. Peter was there, later on. He saw the body. They put it in a cave, and rolled a rock in front of it._

_Peter died the same exact way as his best friend, only upside down. He felt it redeemed him somehow for saying he never knew the guy, when it mattered. Yeshua was later called Jesus. People said he was the Son of God. All over the world, they still pray to him, calling out his name and begging him to save them. Peter agreed, Yeshua probably was the Son of God. He didn't really remember him that way at all, though. Peter only remembered that Yeshua was the only best friend he ever had._

_At least, that was the way Alison always figured it happened._

_Yeshua's mom was named Miriam. She was quiet, but strong. She always looked a little sad, and far away, like she was thinking really deeply about something. Peter liked Miriam. Miriam never had to die. She went right up to heaven, body and all. That part was absolutely true._

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Alison Cameron was ambiguous. Maybe she was like the Mother of God, quiet and strong and gentle. Always willing to listen and soothe and kiss away the bruises of the suffering and dying. They would hold on to her skirts and weep, because she was beautiful and full of a soft light, and she smelled like roses. She herself cried for the world, because they were all her kids, too, and she felt a motherly responsibility to keep them from harm, because she couldn't stop the one she loved best from being nailed to a plank of wood.

But maybe Alison was also very much St. Peter. Weak, scared, alone. Finding strength in the presence of a mad misfit who healed the sick and raised the dead.

A/N Please review...


	9. Chapter 9

Title: **Swimming in the River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron

Disclaimer: I own nothing

_On Tuesday afternoon, November 2nd, Gregory House was in the walk-in clinic at the Princeton-Plainsboro teaching hospital. He hated that place, because everybody who walked-in there was basically stupid. They weren't sick or hurt enough to warrant a visit to the actual emergency room. They were mostly lonely, bored people who couldn't get the top off of a bottle of Motrin by themselves. _

_He limped along, cane tapping against the floor in a kind of irritated rythmn. His sneakers squeked along beside the cane, and altogether Gregory House was a limping symphony of tapping and sqeaking and sarcasm._

_He yanked open the door to Exam Room One with some force, and moved inside. Tap-tap-squeak. _

_There was a woman sitting on the exam table. She had brown hair that was like dead grass. Her eyes were listless and dark. The rest of her face looked like dirty snow, except for the skin beneath her eyes, which was bluish-purple, with a hint of black. She looked as if she hadn't eaten or slept in about ten years. House looked at the skin on her hands. It was beyond red and inflamed. It looked like the surface of the sun. It looked as though she'd stuck her hands into hell and kept them there for awhile before pulling them out. _

_She was shifting her eyes, and looking around nervously. She was looking very closely at everything, as if she could detect invisible microbes that dwelt there. There was a man next to her. He had an expression like grave dirt and muddy rivers. He was her husband. The woman's name was Jude. About three years ago, the husband explained, Jude started getting worried about dumb things. She started thinking everything was dirty. She had the idea that if she didn't flip the lightswitch 32 times every time she went into the bathroom, he would get in an accident and die. She had to flip the lightswitch, to protect him. Then something would go wrong with the flipping, and she'd have to start all over again. She eventually flipped the switch so many times that she shorted a circuit in the wall, and nearly burnt the house down. They moved, because the husband--named Louis--figured that she needed a change. _

_However, then she started becoming afraid to go outside, go anywhere, really, because everything was contaminated. She started to think that everything she touched was contaminated, and then she started to think that **she** was contaminated. Jude took twenty showers a day. She washed her skin with ammonia and rubbing alcohol, and scrubbed it with a brillo pad, because regular soap just couldn't get the germs off._

_Finally, Louis, explained, it had gone too far. There was something wrong. He picked Jude up and literally carried her to the car. And that was how they came to be there, that particular Tuesday afternoon. Jude was still not talking. Her eyes were roaming crazily around everything. She held her hands up and out and away from her and anything else they might touch. The skin on them screamed redly in desperation._

_House couldn't do anything, really. Not for this woman. He muttered something to Louis, then limped out of the room and over to the phone. Tap-tap-squeak._

_He called up to Psych, and asked them to please quickly send someone down to the Walk-In Clinic. The voice on the other end asked for his name again, please. He told them sharply that it was Dr. Gregory House. The voice questioned rhetorically why anyone with that serious a problem would show up at the Walk-In Clinic and not just go to the emergency room, where they would get helped faster? House replied venemously that that was a question for the ages, and for god's sake just send someone._

_He hung up the phone and returned to the room. Tap-tap-squeak. The woman's hands still levitated in front of her. She looked terrified to put them down. House was terrified, looking at her, and that didn't happen very often. He felt depression, and pain, and grief at times in his line of work, of course, absolutely, but never pure and mindless terror. The naked kind of terror that gnaws at the insides of your bones and leeches the marrow. Something about the way she was sitting, holding herself, with her ruined hands in front of her as if she were supporting the world, with an expression that was beyond exhaustion, threw him into a cold and dreadful place inside himself. It was the place where he understood, finally, that there were things he could never fix. Things he could never fix, and that he couldn't blame anyone or anything else for their brokeness. Because they simply **were**. _

_Howard Hughes was an eccentric billionaire. He was called eccentric and not batshit crazy simply because he was so rich. He lived in a sterile environment towards the end of his life. He imprisoned himself there, because the world outside was contaminated. He saved his urine and feces in jars. They made a movie about him, which House slept through most of, called **The** **Aviator, **starring Leonardo DiCaprio._

_Jude wasn't rich, and couldn't buy the label of eccentricity. She wasn't eccentric. She was suffering._

_The average person with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder goes untreated for 17 years. People who have it learn to live with it for awhile. They adapt to it, but all the while feeling that they had an evil little creature feeding on their brain. Eventually, they break down, though. Jude's weird thoughts started 3 years before. The handwashing only started at the end of September. House wondered morbidly what she would have looked like after 14 more years of this. He had the image of a woman with hair like grass, who had washed and washed her skin until there was nothing left but bones._

_The door opened. A woman psychiatrist with red hair and a calm smile entered. Her heels made a clickety-clack sound on the floor. House stood there, feeling useless as stone, and looking like a weathered statue. _

_It took about an hour, the red-haired psychiatrist, 2 orderlies from Psych, and a shot of Thorozine to get Jude into the wheelchair. It took even more Thorozine to keep her calm enough to bandage her hands. She was wheeled out of the room, with eyes glazed over. Her hands were wrapped in white cotton guaze, and she still hadn't set them down completely yet. They hovered whitely a few inches above her lap, like snowflakes that couldn't decide whether or not to fall and risk melting on the sidewalk, under a harsh and relentless sun._

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While House was in the clinic with Jude, Alison Cameron was back in his apartment. She was still on vacation. She had two more days, techinically, of the week of freedom that House promised her. She didn't really know if she had been free. She wasn't sure if she felt rested, or better, or changed at all. She still had her memories, and things and people were still dying. She temporarily lost her home, and was driven from it, which is conducive to vacation, Alison supposed. You weren't supposed to be at home on vacation. Home was normal, and steady. Vacation was shifting on a fault line. It wasn't forever.

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She always searched through his home, the things he kept. Alison wondered what they all meant to House, why he had them, and if there was a story behind it. She didn't mean to pry, she was just curious.

Gregory House was not a religious man. He was not even spiritual. He wasn't anything. There was no King James Bible in his apartment. There was, however, a copy of _The Tibetan Book of the Dead_. It was holding up the coffee table, where part of the table leg was missing. Alison was curious. She pulled the book out from under the table, which immediately became lopsided and off balance.

Inside the book, as inside most books, there were chapters. Alison opened directly to the chapter on the process of dying. Apparently, there were many different stages, before you actually ''died''.

Buddhists don't believe in heaven. Most don't even believe in god. Buddha wasn't a god. He was just more awake than most people. The goal of Buddhism is to reach Nirvana. A lot of people think that Nirvana is the Buddhist version of heaven. Far from it. Nirvana isn't a place. You don't go there. It is a state of being that you achieve through perfect awareness. That's not all, though. To be a really ''good'' Buddhist, you should seek to attain Nirvana, or enlightenment, not just for yourself, but so you could lead other people to that state, and be an example.

Buddha was the first person to admit--yeah, life sucks. It's essentially mostly suffering. But eventually, suffering can be overcome by awareness. Also, by not becoming too attached to anything, because nothing is constant, and everything is in a state of flux. It's pretty simple, really.

Buddhists do, however, believe in reincarnation. You keep coming back until you ''get it right'' in one of your lives and achieve Nirvana. But even then, you are supposed to want to keep coming back, to help people in the world who were stuck in illusion, and were suffering.

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Tucked in the pages, between the chapter on death, and the chapter on rebirth, was a photo. Alison picked it up and looked at it. The photo was of a young man, standing on a beach. The ocean behind the man was unhappy, with choppy water. Jagged rocks were in the background, off to the side, as well. Out in the water, a half-sunken battleship sliced up like a knife into the sky.

The young man was incredibly handsome. He had a long face, with large eyes. His hair was thick and dark brown, and he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans which clung attractively to his tall, lean frame. He was smiling in an almost sarcastic way, as if he knew he was all that, and then some. He had that cocky, ''I'm-a-sex-god-and-I-damn-well-know-it'' kind of look, but it only made him seem even more handsome.

There was a date on the back of the photo. _November 2, 1979_. There was writing, too. _G. House_. _Cape May Point, New Jersey_. Underneath this, there was a line from a poem by E.E. Cummings. The line was:

_''For whatever we lose, like a you or a me, it's always ourselves we find in the sea.''_

It was written down in a way that made Alison think that maybe House had always wanted to remember the exact way he felt at that moment, standing on the beach, but couldn't find his own words to describe it, and used someone else's.

In even smaller letters at the very bottom of the back of the photo was written: ''_Wish you were here.''_

Alison closed the book. She put it back under the table leg, where it was needed as a support. But she kept the photo; for whatever reason, she felt like it belonged to her.

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House had a terrific record collection. He had vinyl records that would someday be worth incredible amounts of money, if he kept them in good condition. And he did. They were lined up neatly on a shelf. He didn't really listen to them all that much, and most of the time he forgot they were there. And then Alison came, and she shook all that up. She took them down, and looked at them, and covered them with her fingerprints. Everything in the whole place now seemed to be covered in her fingerprints, covered in her. Even after she eventually went back home, she would never really leave House's apartment. A balance had been upset somewhere. A line had been crossed. A door had been opened.

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Alison picked up a Pink Floyd record. It was called _''Wish You Were Here.''_ Alison felt a kind of velvet gray sadness inside her. The title of the song made her think of a person who was alone, writing postcards, telling all the things they saw on vacation, not completely happy--because they weren't complete. The postcards were sent to the one whom they were apart from, the one who could complete them. The postcards always pretty much ended the same way. Having fun...wish you were here.

Most people sent postcards from the shore. Any shore, whether the coast of New Jersey, or California, it didn't matter. Wherever there was an ocean, and people stood at the edge of it, they felt alone, and shaky, and only half-formed. There was nothing to put on a postcard from the shore really, except ''wish you were here.''

What Alison found, tucked in the book between death and rebirth, the book that supported the broken leg of a table was not a postcard. It was never sent anywhere, or to anyone. But, eventually, it got where it needed to go, all the same. It just took longer getting there.

A/N Please review...


	10. Chapter 10

Title**: Swimming In The River Lethe**

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

On Wednesday night, the third of November, Alison Cameron and Gregory House sat together on the couch in House's apartment. They were sitting side by side but not touching. The television was on, and a movie channel was showing _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_. Alison had never seen it before. House wondered what rock she had been living under.

She thought it was the best damn thing she had ever seen. Alison laughed so hard that she doubled over and wrapped her arms around herself, because it was the kind of laughter that was so intense it almost hurt. The absurdity of the movie, combined with the absurdity and sadness of the past week in general, had given way to a kind of hysterical giddiness. It made her laugh until she couldn't breathe, and she wondered if she was dying, but she didn't care because at that moment, everything was alright.

They both fell asleep on the couch. The TV was still on, and the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy, all three movies, were being shown in consecutive order. They had fallen asleep when Frodo set out from the shire, with loyal Sam at his side, ready to take a journey that would lead them into the unknown. Alison and Greg slept through all of the first movie, and the second one. Alison woke briefly during _The Return of the King_, but she didn't remember what part, and fell back asleep. Her head was resting on House's shoulder. She dreamed about stone; statues that wept, and rocks which held swords. She dreamt of water; of lakes with women, and rivers that ran deep and dark. And oceans, like the ocean where all life began.

It always seemed to begin with water.

Water that birthed, water that drowned. Water that soothed, tears that ran. Water covered; water held forgotten things, but then returned them. Sooner or later, everything lost at sea washed up again on the shore.

Round and round goes the world.

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The next day was Thursday. There had been a storm during the night. A man had been struck by lightning and was rushed to the E.R. at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. He had no ID. His shoes had melted completely, and his heart had stopped. Paddles were used to shock it back to life. Electricity had killed him, and electricity revived him.

The man would always forget things. He would have short-term memory loss for the rest of his life. But he would be alive.

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Gregory House went to work on that Thursday. Alison was sleeping when he left. She was sleeping on the couch, where they had spent the night. He left her there; she was breathing deeply and evenly. She looked like she belonged there. House didn't know how he felt about that.

He came home that same night, and paused outside his own front door. It looked different. House had never really looked at it from the outside, needing what was inside so much. He opened the door, and walked in.

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The rain had given way to snow that Thursday night. There were flakes falling fatly to earth, covering everything in white powder. House had beat the snow home, at five o clock in the evening. Now he was sitting in the kitchen with Alison. The kitchen was bright and warm and felt safe. House needed a cup of coffee. He prepared himself for a long search for the sugar, but it was right in plain view on the counter.

Alison was eating vanilla ice cream. The carton was almost empty, and she dug around the bottom with a spoon to salvage the last bits. She had tied her hair into loose pigtails. She looked sweet. She looked like everything good and wonderful and ok, and nothing bad at all.

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It was five minutes to nine o clock, and Alison and Greg found themselves in the living room.

Alison had called Mr. Alberti earlier that day. The roof was fixed, pretty much, and so was the carpet. She wouldn't have to pay for those. But she would need a new couch, and a new everything else that was ruined the day the ceiling rained bloody water.

Alison could leave House's apartment now, after this odd vacation. She felt like she was a little girl again, on vacation at the shore in a beach house. Looking out of the window at the ocean after a week of memory and sand and salt and ice cream and sunburn. Thinking it would soon all be over, and she would be back in the real world, with the same problems, and no real answers; just memories.

She packed her things; the shampoo she bought, the battered copy of A Farewell to Arms. Alison also took the book about King Arthur, and she took the photo she had found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. House had forgotten about it long ago, and he would never know it was missing. She let House keep the copper pot with the Virgin Mary on it. It was still in the cupboard.

Alison left the apples and pears in the drawer in the refrigerator. The carton of milk was half-empty. The box of pasta was never opened. Dried pasta would keep for a very long time. It didn't go bad.

She stood, ready to go, and not saying anything. Alison and House looked at each other. Awkwardly, Alison moved foreward, then backward, then forewards again. She put her arms around House. He didn't pull away, but he stood very stiffly. Then he relaxed slightly, and put his long arms around her.

Alison pulled back slightly, and looked into his eyes. They were like a wild and violent ocean crashing waves of electric-blue fire. Hers were deep like a river; deep as an ancient lake.

It always came back to water, and water washed everything back. Everything that had been drowned, or lost, or forgotten.

Alison moved closer, then, and pressed her mouth to his very delicately.

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She had wondered forever what it would be like to kiss him. Times before, long before, it seemed, when she watched him. Watched the way he fought against everything. The way he was sad and sarcastic and restless, but also strong. She was driven to him, pulled to him. When she was afraid, standing on the edge of the world, Alison went to him, because he was the safest place.

He kissed her like she always imagined he would. An awkward meeting of mouths at first, getting used to each other. Very soft, like sunshine touching the earth in early spring. Then it was full and rich and deep with longing, like spring passing into summer. And then it was hot and passionate and burning, like the end of July.

And then, and then, and then, full of clashing, frenzied desperation and clinging, like autumn.

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Alison felt a roaring in her ears, like the ocean. Her blood was crashing and rushing through her veins like a river.

The kiss ended; her face was hot and her eyes were shining. She could scarcely breathe; everything around her felt muted and blurry. It was terrifying and wonderful.

They were still holding each other, but very carefully. Greg House and Alison Cameron were standing at the exact spot where Alison had fallen to the floor a week before, crying about death.

She had wanted salvation; she had wanted an answer. She had wanted to rest; she had wanted to forget. And yet, all she got in the end was memory.

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There wasn't any answer to death, or where the people behind the eyes really went. They died and were eventually forgotten; their bodies dissolved in the ground slowly, or were burned and scattered. These people, however, left things behind. Belongings, objects covered in their fingerprints. These objects exchanged hands over and over again.

Alison had no answer, she had gone swimming in Lethe, the river of forgetting. All she found there was memory; the very memories that made the water flow.

It always began, and ended with, water.

She moved towards the door. She moved like the falling of rain. She moved away from House, and her fingers fells away from his.

Alison pulled open the door.

''Are you going to be ok?'' House asked her. The question fell like a stone.

''I think so'', she said.

''Will you really?''

''I...don't know.''

Then,

''See you tomorrow, Cameron.''

''See you tomorrow, Dr. House.''

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House shut the door. Alison was gone, but everything about her was still there. She would never leavem really.

He would see her the next day, but it wouldn't be the same. House didn't know how it would change; it could tip either way. He felt as if he were balanced precariously on the edge of the world.

He never listened to those records any more. But on Thursday night, he did. House walked over to the shelf where they were all neatly lined up. He took one down, and looked at it.

_''Wish You Were Here''_, by Pink Floyd. It was covered in her fingerprints.

A/N Please review...


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